Canada

As clearly this thread has no clue what goes on at universities, or even knows the difference between universities and colleges, I'll explain the OPs point.

$1.7B for 1000 scientist is $1.7M each, for 5 years in total. For senior scientists, this covers salary. But now we have 1000 extra grant applications in a system that is funded at 20% the level of the US per capita. This means we will try and recruit Americans, but tell them they will have an under 10% chance of getting any grant money, and that grant size is half a typical NIH or NSF grant. Large projects? Zero. This research has to be done somewhere, which costs universities money. The same universities getting squeezed by frozen tuitions the last 6 years.

So it is a designed bullshit line item. No one will access this because by the time it rolls out to real funds, the US will have reverted funding and going back to trouncing this banana republic. Excellence, why would an established scientists move to a poorly funded system? They will get more done of they just ride the storm in US.

This money goes to cancer and disease research, like lipid nanoparticles that saved millions of lives with COVID vaccines (yes, that came from Canada), or neural network algorithms driving trillions in investment, also from Canada, but we just pissed away that IP to the US for a handful of shiny rocks.

If Carney is serious about CDN productivity, he needs to fund R&D at per capita levels closer to US or China and make sure the result of this research is developed in Canada, not just sold off cheap to the US as per the last 60 years. A decent economist would realize there is tremendous potential return on investment, far higher than subsidies for pickup truck production to US corporations, and certainly more than the 100-150x more we waste on military spending which does nothing for the CDN economy.

This does not affect colleges. They don't do research and are for vocational training.

Are we now acting like universities are poor and aren’t gouging the fuck out of everyone?

I watched my local college lose all its credibility as a result of running borderline scams for foreign students. My old university otoh has been rather smart about not becoming too dependent on foriegn student tuition. I love immigration, and especially think exporting our education is a good thing, but the way these programs have been run in recent years is a cancer on these institutions and pure short term thinking. I'd rather see reform, but this is almost as good.

Once they come for the universities, you know whats up. Happened in nazi germany, where they burned intellectual property including but not limited to the studies of the university of berlin about gender theory.

There is too much bloat. I've seen first hand essentially glorified admins being paid $130k + full pension. They need to trim the fat at these places and restructure operations to get rid of all the waste.